Partly Sunny

Not sure where March has gone. Seem to have spent most of it struggling to stay awake, and I'm hoping the sun starts working on me soon the way it is working on the little green sprouts coming up here and there around the yard. Feel like I've had the flu since Christmas....

Part of this has been too much time on the road - two trips to Nashville in a month, both of them for just two or three days. (And not counting several trips to Cincinnati and elsewhere.) Twelve+ hours on the road in three days with two shows sandwiched in between is too much. Those are the trips where I come home, climb gratefully into my own bed, close my eyes, and see the interstate. It's like a horrible video game that won't turn off - flying down the highway, cars zipping in and out, green signs and concrete barrier walls whizzing by. It's hard to go straight to sleep without closing your eyes first.

Then there are just all the other little obligations in life - birthdays and laundry, phone calls and appointments, guests and cats. And taxes - blech. I hate taxes. I don't mind the actual paying of them, oddly enough - just the gathering of papers, the sorting of receipts, the compiling of numbers, and the fear that we're going to get audited or slapped with an unexpected payment that I won't have the money for. That appointment, mercifully, is this evening, and I'm hoping that it will just take all the money we have in savings and nothing more. The more part, I'm not sure where I'm going to get, so again, just hoping it doesn't come to that.

And, it's been a long week with John Henry's surgery. The laser surgery near his eye to remove his tumor has left him in a E. collar and surprisingly needy. I can't bear to turn him away, because I know he doesn't feel well, but his face looks gruesome, blood seeping out from around his eyelids, and he wants to be so close that you can smell the metallic odor of dried blood, no matter how much you wash his face. (And I'll not even go into the fact that cleaning his face makes me feel like I'm cleaning an Italian Renaissance painting - cotton swabs only, no cloths....) And his little collar is plastic and sweaty, so I wake up in the middle of the night, staring into this eye puckered with stitches, my arm numb and sticky from weight and plastic, and I just do my best to go back to sleep and not disturb him. Reminding myself that I should be flattered that my presence seems to soothe him is not much of a sleep aid. A long week, but only one more to go.

Things are beginning to look up though. Green sprouts in the yard are happy signs, and I discovered some crocuses down in the woods to relocate this fall. We also planted two little pots of evening primrose that a friend gave us back on the woodline. Hopefully, they'll get busy with growing and blooming - I put them in a space where they could easily colonize a four-foot stretch of bank. Web conference this afternoon, and otherwise a quiet day. Have hopes to put fresh set of sheets on the bed, wash the others and put them out to dry in the sun. And I was ambitious yesterday and made a big pot of vegetable soup, so I wouldn't have to cook tonight in addition to the tax appointment. (Optimistic - assumes that I will have an appetite after leaving the tax office....) I have small star pasta to add to it, which will be a happy addition. Holds on new books at the library, evidence of the columbine peeping up by the mailbox, and money-saving plans for a garden full of tomatoes for canning - all of which will translate to obligations and expenses in a few months, but possibilities are free!